I'm the Co-Founder of NETexponent, an interactive shop specializing in Search, Affiliate, and Partnership marketing for big brand clients. I've been doing this since the good ole' days of 1998.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Offensive Marketing - Somebody Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Walking to work today I passed a series of flyers up and down the street for what I thought was a missing person alert. Upon further inspection I see that it reads:

"I am looking for my wife. She has lost 187 lbs using portionpals (this is her before picture) and now that she is skinny I cannot find her. Please help!"

This is one of the most offensive advertising concepts one could possibly think of. Over 2300 people go missing each day in this country and this company creates a fake missing person flyer to sell a diet product?

I called PortionPals for a response and they told me that a "distributor" had posted the flyers and that once alerted to these ads they began taking them down but couldn't finish because of the rain. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt since there was a pretty big storm here last night. In any case - its sunny out now and if I were them I'd get some people to finish the job.